Information and Consent Form

Dear Potential Research Participant:

My name is Kadie Weaver and I am a doctoral candidate at Spalding University. I am conducting a research study as part of my doctoral program in Clinical Psychology.

Description: The purpose of the current study is to examine the relationship between stress, coping, and relationship satisfaction in different types of couples. The tasks involved include answering demographic information and multiple choice questions in a brief questionnaire.

Risks/Benefits: There are no foreseeable serious risks involved in participating in this study. However, an emotional response may be elicited to some scale items if a participant were sensitive to the topic of those items. The level of discomfort is judged to be equivalent to encountering these issues in one’s daily life such as reading a newspaper article on the subject. Additionally, there should be no risks of confidentiality breaches on this survey as no names or identifying information are being collected and the researchers will keep all information that is collected password protected. Should a participant decide to send the link for the survey to a friend, which will be encouraged, it is possible that the friend could be offended or upset from being asked to take a survey. This level of discomfort would be equivalent to other real life situations in which we receive email or mail invitations to participate in surveys and thus is anticipated to be a minimal risk.

Participants will be asked multiple choice questions regarding their demographics, romantic relationship, and level of stress. The entire questionnaire should take 5-10 minutes and all answers will be confidential and anonymous. Data will be collected on a secure (i.e., encrypted) and password-protected survey site. Testing data will be analyzed in a group format and therefore you will not receive individual feedback on your test results. Results of the study will be presented during the dissertation defense, which is open to the public, once results have been analyzed and interpreted. The primary benefit of this research is adding to the further understanding of how different types of couples interact together so as to better inform which areas to focus interventions on in treatment.

Voluntary Participation and Right to Withdraw: You are free to stop participating at any point. Your participation in this research is completely voluntary. You can withdraw from the study at any time, for any reason, without penalty.

Confidentiality: The results of this study will be analyzed in terms of groups of adults. All information obtained will be strictly confidential. Your anonymous results will be used for research purposes only but may be shown to people outside of the research team in a group format.

Please contact Kadie Weaver, M.A. at 614-507-1837 or kadie.fritz@gmail.com to request the results of this study or if you have any further questions. This project is being supervised by Dr. Tom Bergandi who can be reached at tbergandi@spalding.edu.

1.I have read this statement and agree to participate in the research under the conditions presented.